


the heart is a muscle

by rqtheory



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Found Family, Gen, OF COURSE IT'S FOUND FAMILY IT'S ME
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-20
Updated: 2017-08-20
Packaged: 2018-12-17 18:20:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11857047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rqtheory/pseuds/rqtheory
Summary: When Julia died Magnus had known he wouldn't love again. It had been a simple fact, as real as breathing. She had been there, and now she was gone, and he would never love anyone again, and that was that.





	the heart is a muscle

_I will not play this out discreetly, it is real and unashamed_  
_I am human now, and terrified, but want it all the same_

** Gang of Youths, The Heart Is A Muscle **

 

When Julia died Magnus had known he wouldn't love again. It had been a simple fact, as real as breathing. She had been there, and now she was gone, and he would never love anyone again, and that was that.

He'd lived like that for a long time. He was an outgoing person, by nature, and he got along fine with people he met on the road. It was easy to lean on the superficial attachments people made to him when they encountered his openness and ease, and that was enough; if he had someone to watch his back in a fight and someone to drink a pint with afterwards, that all-encompassing, life-defining love wasn't necessary.

Of course he missed it. Of course he spent nights awake sometimes, staring at the ceiling, thinking about the warm, comforting things he knew he felt the absence of without really remembering what they’d felt like in the first place, how they’d affected him, when he had them. But everyone did that, of course. That’s just how grief worked.

The thought of being vulnerable again - letting someone else in, dropping the guards and opening himself up again to loss - he couldn't. So he didn't. People tried, of course, and he tried in turn to be gentle and careful with their feelings - fragile, delicate things, like cupping a tiny bird in his hands - but he always said no, no thanks. And it always worked; they went away disappointed but unhurt, and he was safe.

And then, he answered a fateful job ad.

The first few months were as they'd always been, whenever he'd teamed up with different folks to do different jobs over the last few years, always keeping an ear to the ground and an eye on the horizon for - well he didn’t really remember, anymore, but there was definitely something. It didn’t matter; the point was, he met Taako and Merle and even Barry and he treated them the same way he'd treated everyone since her - affable, polite, friendly, distant.

Somewhere along the way he’d started to care.

He wouldn't have admitted to it if he'd been asked. It was still a job, it was still enforced intimacy because of a wider, more important goal. They lived in eachother's space but they didn't live  _together_. They spent almost all of their time doing the same things but it was coincidence and work, not because they were  _fond_  of eachother. He had been making these excuses to himself for months, ignoring the fierce, immediate urge to leap to their defense any time anything happened to either of them. That was just sensible teamwork.

And then they got to Wonderland. And Magnus watched both of them beaten, maimed, bloodied, backed up against literal and figurative walls and it was all he could do to contain the explosive, terrified need to dive in front of the blows, every time. By the end of it he knew, somewhere subconscious, that he'd been in denial for months now, that the absence of romantic feeling wasn't an absence of love, that Merle and Taako were as critical to his being and his sense of self as Julia had been.

He hadn't even been given a chance to think about how to tackle that when he died.

And Taako leapt after him, unthinking, pulled him back from the brink of a fate he shuddered to think about, even now. It could have been over, in that moment, and he never would have had the chance to be honest with himself about what he thought about them. What he _felt_.

The whirlwind of events overtook them all after that, and he was too busy with what was happening to really consider the realization, which was good, because he couldn't afford to be distracted.

And then, he remembered.

The impact of a hundred years of memories left him reeling, even staggered as they were, but the first thought he had once his head stopped spinning was ' _of course I love them, of course, of course_ ,' a delighted and genuine voice singing it out joyfully at the top of its lungs. His family, his  _family_ , how could he have forgotten so many years of learning and teasing and crying and living together, side by side, lives wound together so tightly they formed an impenetrable tapestry of mundaneness and grief and suffering and love spanning multiple generations of an ordinary life.

He hadn't had time to properly absorb it, immediately rolling into the next, desperate fight and the next, throwing himself into the battles with gusto, determined, now, to live and live well, a life he'd be proud of not just for himself and for Julia but for his family, fighting right alongside him. And he had lived, and so had they, because they'd fallen back into place so easily, let the hundred looped years reset them so quickly, which coupled with months of shared space and shared training turned them into a formidable, unstoppable force. And they'd won. Of course they had.

So they got home and it was frantic, desperate embraces all around, the memories of the Bureau and of Faerun a short, recent overlay on the IPRE years, chatter and laughter and "oh gods do you remember when-" over and over until his cheeks were hurting from smiling so hard but he just couldn't seem to make his face do a single different expression.He remembered - _Lucretia_ , both of them the youngest members of the crew, barely out of their teen years, humans, totally opposite in personality but drawn together out of some fledgling sense of solidarity.They’d spent the first ten years leaning on eachother, learning about eachother, drawing on eachother’s strengths and supporting eachother through their own weaknesses, and then he’d gone and forgotten it all. And he remembered - dying, multiple times, and the sickening jerk through time when he started the years anew. The overwhelming, desperate fondness from the crew, from _all_ of the crew, whenever he was pulled through planes and dimensions back to life after dying, nauseating vertigo immediately displaced by affection.

In momentary lulls he still found himself looking out for Taako and Merle. There hadn’t been anything particularly special - at least, not comparatively - about their friendship on the Starblaster, but they were also his most recent, significant attachment, and they knew more about him now than any of the others. He caught them looking at him a few times, in the same way, even though they were both caught up in their own frenetic reconnections with the rest of the group.

The Faerun natives had been awkward at first, hanging back, wanting to give them space, but Magnus found himself almost absently pulling Angus up to sit on his shoulders, able to say “Hey, amazing job today, kiddo,” with an ease that surprised him, and the tension broke and a sudden flood of affection and chatter enveloped them on all sides, Bureau members excitedly quizzing Davenport and Lup and Barry in particular, all fascinated by the things they suddenly knew and the things that they didn’t. All in all it was the kind of evening which Magnus remembered from the original IPRE journey, where everyone suddenly let their own differences fade into insignificance, on a far greater scale and propelled by the irrepressible sense of relief they all felt - _we won, we won, we won_. The sun sunk below the horizon and dinner appeared from somewhere, cobbled together from whatever was available. Someone commandeered the closest tavern, then, and ale started flowing, which was enough for the bards in the audience to be pressed into shifts, exhausted or no.

The party was in full swing, nighttime lit with the glow of a dozen impromptu bonfires, when Lup tracked him down. He’d found a relatively dim corner to drink his ale and watch the dancing, finding himself keeping an eye on Angus being spun between various members of the Bureau, ready to step in and rescue him if anyone was a _little_ too affected to be careful with his small frame around the live flames.

“Hey, short stuff,” she said, looking up at him, not bothering to make her spectral form take on proportions any different to her own, the joke in her address obvious. “Doing ok?”

He was suddenly gripped with a fervent, overwhelming desire to hug her, and it was strikingly upsetting that he couldn’t. “Yeah. What a relief, huh?”

“Yeah,” she agreed, and followed his line of sight out over to where Angus was being flung around in circles, laughing his head off, by a succession of Bureau employees, including Taako. “Looks like my brother went and got himself a nephew out of nowhere.”

“He’s a good kid,” Magnus told her. “A great kid.” And then he fell silent, embarrassed at himself, but Lup was too smart to be deterred by the quiet.

“Seems it,” she agreed, and gestured as though to punch his shoulder though of course it didn’t connect. “You gonna look after him now?”

He didn’t know how she’d seen so quickly to the heart of what he’d been thinking about, and it made him feel awkward, too big for his skin, an exposed nerve. But he gripped his courage tightly and said, “Yeah, if he wants,” and made a point of not looking at Lup.

She chuckled quietly beside him. “You’ll be as great a dad as you are a brother, Mags,” she said, utterly sincere, and Magnus felt the weight of the day’s realisations pressing in on him and his throat closing over with all the things he didn’t know how to say to the people he wanted to say them to. She must have sensed it, because she drifted closer to him, form folding as though she was sitting even though there was no need, and said, “Hey. Sit down, tell me about what I missed.”

Magnus choked on a laugh, struggling with the concurrent need to sob and shout with joy. “Well then. I guess I should tell you about Julia.”

**Author's Note:**

> I promised myself I wasn't gonna do post-canon fic for weeks and then Gang of Youths released 'Go Farther in Lightness' which includes a track called ['The Heart is a Muscle'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvUAKRju_S8&list=PLWXYoPUHPYMG2enYN3rQcdjW413dGrCy0&index=9) (possibly geolocked; lyrics are [here](https://genius.com/Gang-of-youths-the-heart-is-a-muscle-lyrics)) and I burst into tears on a cross-trainer thinking about Travis changing his mind about Magnus dying, hi, I'm full of FEELINGS.
> 
> I am slowly getting closer to pinning Magnus down in my head, but this is basically a really long character study with not much to recommend it other than how neatly it exposes me as a desperately sentimental dork.


End file.
